Ugly House Diaries: Fabulous Find

We totally lucked out last fall. There's this awesome store in S. Amherst called The Trading Post that has tons and tons of old furniture and odds and ends. We have a few pieces of furniture from there plus some other random things I've stumbled upon from time to time. We knew when we left our apartment/condo/quarter-of-a-house in Florence we would need a new dresser of some description. I gave my childhood dresser a facelift, and it now lives in our guest room. We used a monstrous wardrobe from IKEA at our old place since it didn't have a closet, but there was no way that thing was coming with us to our new home. Plus the fact it wouldn't fit or would've died on the drive over. (For more of my opinions of large IKEA furniture, leave a comment or email me. It's a good story.)

So we were without a dresser in our new bedroom, and kept clothes in two different closets and furniture in other rooms. Then I found the best dresser ever (see it in all its glory below). It was only $50 at The Trading Post--solid, heavy wood (good construction); 9 drawers and it didn't need to be refinished! All I needed to do was replace the pink zebra ribbon that substituted as drawer pulls with real ones.

We kept the dresser in our garage until we had finished painting and staining in the master...then December came and we were done and the beautiful piece is finally being used!! (forgive the run-on sentence...I was pretty excited!) There was a slight hang-up when we determined there was a puzzle to be solved with the drawers, but after several minutes of configuring by the engineer (Andrew) and the math whiz/Sudoku lover (Sarah) we were in business. All I needed to do was find economical yet stylish hardware. Now to the educational/how-to part of the post:

Need to spruce up your nightstand or chest of drawers? Why not give it a paint job and some new hardware? Both are easy ways to keep your furniture regardless of changing decor. For this particular dresser, the 6 exterior drawers measured 4.5 inches between holes, while the doors to the interior drawers measure 3 inches. Three inches is a pretty standard size for pulls, so you should be able to find multiple choices at varying price ranges at Lowes, Home Depot or even Wal-Mart. The occasional four and five inch pulls can also be located. Weird sizes, like 4.5 inches, are harder to come by. There is the option of special ordering, but those pieces of hardware will cost more than your furniture. We chose to use pulls for the doors and knobs for the drawers. This did mean buying more hardware, but we found knobs on clearance.

If you are set on having matching pulls across the board or want pulls without having to special order, you can always fill in the holes and drill new ones. This would have been a more viable option if I was planning to refinish the dresser. We also knew the holes for whatever original hardware used were slightly too large, and the screw might not hold. Simple fix: buy washers. In the pictures below you can see what I did to take the drawers from a hot pink zebra mess to a look my husband would appreciate.